I am Already a Winner

I had my Battlebot, another companion pet in furtherance of my WoW achievement goals.

I had collected a pile of fuel for said Battlebot, but it was largely going unused. Blizzard might have a nice gallery of pictures, but I’ve only ever seen three Battlebots out at a time, and only once were all three actually fueled up.

The fuel is part of the problem. I have been asked a number of times in-game where to get the fuel. You have to go back to the Game Fuel site the day after you get the Battlebot and click on the button for some fuel.

You only get five units of fuel per daily visit to the site. Five is not much, especially when you lose it if your Battlebot goes away for any reason, so I am sure people don’t want to waste it on the off chance of a battle.

And then, just to make things a bit more annoying, the fuel only stacks in units of 20, so if you start hoarding the stuff, it starts taking up valuable inventory slots. Why Blizzard, why?

Bot fuel in my bag

I had been stockpiling fuel, but I gave it up last week.

But while I was doing my daily fuel run, I also took a minute to accumulate some prize tokens, which you can enter in the many daily drawings. You get 25 for each daily visit and you can earn more through various other actions. The easiest is to watch videos. You get 25 tokens each time you watch a video, though you get the tokens about 2 seconds into the video and sticking around seems purely optional, and there are 15 videos up currently, so you can get 400 tokens a day.

The first couple of days I threw my tokens after any prize that looked like it was lightly camped. You can see how many tokens have been spent against any given drawing. Then I saw there was a trip to BlizzCon as one of the prizes, so I saved up my tokens and put them all on that.

I heard nothing. Tokens into the wind.

That was amusing for a couple more days after which I couldn’t be bothered. I collected some more tokens, put them up against some prizes and then stopped showing up.

But on Monday there was a package in the mail for me. In it there was a note.

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have been drawn as a winner in the Mountain Dew Game Fuel “Choose Your Side” World of Warcraft Promotion.

Your prize is enclosed.

On behalf of the Pepsi-Cola Company, we thank you for your participation in this sweepstakes.

Young America Corporation

They don’t notify you if you win a small prize, they just send it to you.

Or they tell Young America Corperation to send it to you, since they appear to be the prize clearing house that Pepsi is using.

Oh, and also enclosed was a Mtn Dew Game Fuel T-shirt.

I went back and checked through the winners list and found that I was a winner the day after my original post on the subject.

I'm on that list

The shirt itself is… well… it is okay I guess. I tend towards white T-shirts when I have a choice. The graphic on it is good enough I suppose, in a cheap concert-shirt sort of way. I’ll wear it around the house on the weekends I’m sure.

Rock on Alliance! Rock on Horde!

The graphic itself is awkwardly placed on the lower right side of the shirt, wrapping around from front to back, as if placed to protect the stomach under my sword arm. Since I tend to tuck in my shirt, you lose a good third of the graphic. The shirt does have a nice Blizzard logo on the back of the collar.

So I am a winner!

And, while checking out the winners on the site, I noticed that the BlizzCon trip is still listed as “pending verification.” They might be trying to get in touch! Any messages for me?

Well, I can dream.

Anyway, this all inspiried me to go back to the site and watch some more videos. I think I’ll save up my tokens are try for a pair of the Razer Carcharias headsets that they are giving away.

I only run 4 addons these days, QuestHelper, Gatherer, Auctioneer, and AlphaMap.

I believe that additional information is part of Auctioneer. That info can be handy in picking quest rewards when you aren’t going to use any of the choices. You can see which one you can vendor for the most cash. You can also see which gray vendor trash you should toss first when you bag gets full.

I have my own bit of paranoia and wouldn’t have put that screen shot up if it had shown my last name. But my first name is John, which was the #1 name for boys in the decade in which I was born as well as the preceding decade, if I remember correctly. So I find that to be a good enough smoke screen.

Besides which, I have used my name on the SUWT podcast as well. I just stick to the handle because… well… habit. And the fact that my name is John and isn’t very distinctive blah blah blah.